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SO! That's what a Merced-class starship looks like. Never seen the Trieste before, yet it's been mentioned many times in TNG. I wonder if that miniature was made to be shown during the blockade in "Redemption Pt II".

Really cool photos. The "USS Excel" is kind of funny - not much imagination went into that one.

And while we're talking about Curry/Shelley-style starships, we should never forget about the USS Raging Queen.

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I may appear unoccupied to you, but at the molecular level, I'm really quite busy.

SO! That's what a Merced-class starship looks like. Never seen the Trieste before, yet it's been mentioned many times in TNG. I wonder if that miniature was made to be shown during the blockade in "Redemption Pt II".

I'd rather that this be an old (as per the registry) and long since retired Trieste of some other class, dug out of mothballs (or a scrap heap) and refitted for duty in the war by adding anachronistic engines... Say, as a clumsy but navigable platform for some heavy artillery, much like often happens in real naval warfare.

Sure, the portholes look TNG'ish. But we don't know how this one would have looked like on screen - perhaps the portholes would not have been visible after all?

(The dayglo colors we can ignore: they are just for VFX purposes, to allow different types of lighting effects to be painted on them at specific passes. It doesn't appear as if this model would be internally lit.)

As for the Curry, I like to view her through the assumption that the engines are Miranda standard. That way, the secondary hull does not have appreciable volume for any sort of accommodation - Marines, fightercraft or anything else. But it's the perfect grapple for those FJ style containers, hugging their upper bow and towing them the way FJ's Ptolemy was supposed to. The extra impulse engines on the towing fixture only come to play when there's cargo in tow. Similarly, the two deflectors on the bow (the dish, and the bronze-hued, curved topside emitter, similar to the one atop the Centaur and too small to be a practical shuttlebay door regardless of assumed scale) complement each other for the two different load conditions the ship may experience.

On further reflection I'm gonna guess that the saucer was simply not glued to the secondary hull. There are hints of SOMETHING under there (look forward of the shuttlecraft top piece in the aft view polaroid) but more likely it was simple bits to keep it intact for shooting.

There's definitely a neck there between the saucer and the secondary hull, and a substantial one. It looks to me that it's actually the Excelsior's neck, turned upside down and attached to the middle of the saucer underside. When I built my model, that's what I did, and it looks like that. However, I was hoping to have a clearer pic of that neck when I got these pics, but it was not to be.

Oho! I had not seen that pic before, but I agree that's what it looks like (without the typically dark-colored Excelsineck, too). Could you show us what you did with it? As it stands, the neck would have to be trimmed to fit the underside of the saucer...

Just putting this out there for general discussion. The excelsior kitbashes were never properly identified by class (Shelly, Raging Queen or Centaur types isn't really an official class name). Been wondering if anyone else thought these designs could/should have been other established classes in the Star Trek canon like the Hokule'a, Merced, or Mediterranean classes. I mean hey why not?

^^^ On the previous page, in the OP, there is an image of a kitbash with the name USS Trieste (NCC-3724), using a Miranda frame with Galaxy engines, Runabout weapons pod pylons, and a whole boatload of seemingly random greebles attached to it (including what appear to be a pair of very non-Starfleet looking Rebel ion cannons from Star Wars). It may match this USS Trieste (with a near-identical registry of NCC-37124) that was supposed to have been seen in TNG Redemption Pt 2 as a part of the blockade fleet, but was never actually shown. This may be what the long-lost Merced class looked like. I still don't think we've seen a Hokule'a or Mediterranean yet, but I think those are the last two class names remaining that we don't know what they look like, unless they can maybe be mapped back to some of the Excelsior study models from TSFS or something.

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I may appear unoccupied to you, but at the molecular level, I'm really quite busy.

Well that's why I wonder about the Curry, Centaur and Raging Queen as being possible candidates for the Hokule'a, Mediterranean, maybe even the Apollo or Renaissance classes. The registries fit for those designs and it appears the Hokule'a was described to be a transport (though I've no real evidence to support that claim). Yeah it is also possible that (ugly) Trieste kitbash was the elusive Merced class (perhaps they couldn't find an extra 1 lol), so maybe the others are established classes as well?

Man, that Trieste. I like her because of how fugly she is. I think. Some sort of surveillance/command ship would seem to fit her nicely, but then again Data said she was small and slow. Maybe a buoy tender or something like that?

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"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." - Q

Just putting this out there for general discussion. The excelsior kitbashes were never properly identified by class (Shelly, Raging Queen or Centaur types isn't really an official class name). Been wondering if anyone else thought these designs could/should have been other established classes in the Star Trek canon like the Hokule'a, Merced, or Mediterranean classes. I mean hey why not?

It is my personal belief that these kitbashes should not be equated with the conjectural classes simply because that was not the intention of the model builders, and also that I would rather classes like the Hokule'a, Renaissance and Merced be original designs instead of hastily constructed and out-of-scale kitbashes.

Praetor wrote:

Man, that Trieste. I like her because of how fugly she is. I think. Some sort of surveillance/command ship would seem to fit her nicely, but then again Data said she was small and slow. Maybe a buoy tender or something like that?

Data actually meant that the Trieste was too slow to catch up to the hijacked Enterprise-D, not that she was a slow ship overall. Of course, why her small size would have anything to do with her speed is beyond me.

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"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." - Q

It is possible that the older Miranda-style core that this thing might have had was too underpowered to drive the newer engines. It then begs the question of why did the Starfleet Corps of Engineers go to all the trouble of bolting on scaled down Galaxy engines (they were probably left-overs from an unfinished Nebula prototype stuck in a drydock somewhere) without beefing up the core to support the load?

This may actually be touching on the reason the model was never used. The dialog was already written when Data described her as too slow. Then, when the producers saw the model with 24th century Galaxy components, they maybe felt like it didn't look like it should have been "too slow". It was likely just a throw-away line that didn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but the bridge footage was probably already filmed and put together and they just opted to save some money by leaving out the extra visual effects of a new ship that didn't quite match implied dialog (and they probably thought it was too ugly to show on screen, too). It is, quite possibly, one of the oddest kitbashes I've seen in Trek, rivaled only by a small handful of some of the more bizarre DS9 frankenfleet members.

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I may appear unoccupied to you, but at the molecular level, I'm really quite busy.